The Martial Unity

A deductively sound and logical line of thought. the Elder Tree commented, listening to his internal monologue.

"Wait, I can't hide my thoughts from you?"

Correct. Your mind is certainly more powerful than that of almost any other person, barring Martial Artists of the Upper Realms, I have ever seen, but you lack the power to hide it from me, it reported.

That was inconvenient.

Indeed.

However, that didn't mean that he couldn't use this to his advantage.

And just how would you?

Rui stared at the Elder Tree as a smirk emerged on his face. "Because now you have no justification to not trust the sincerity of the trade offers that I make to you."

…

"Hahaha!" Kane cackled. "That's genius. But what trade offers did you have in mind?"

None.

"It's right," Rui remarked calmly. "None. At least, nothing specific yet. However…"

He narrowed his eyes. "…I have power. I possess unrivaled political power over a Sage-level powerhouse. I have something to offer to everybody. And everybody has something that they could get from me. Something they need. Something they want."

…

The Elder Tree knew that he was telling the truth, having scoured through Rui's memories to learn more about him while recreating his home in the Garden of Salvation. It had grown startled at the fact that such an important individual of the Human Domain had thrown himself into the Beast Domain.

"And I am relatively certain that you are a living being that is as needy as it is powerful. Am I wrong?"

…

Rui smirked, continuing. "This place…"

He gestured to the vast and expansive Garden of Salvation.

"…This is not something that one would do out of the kindness of one's heart."

Rui had come to the conclusion quite confidently.

No creature with any sense of self-preservation would go out of their way to create such an extraordinarily difficult set of operations that he had borne witness to in the Garden of Salvation.

"First, this world is isolated from the rest of the Beast Domain," Rui remarked. "I'd previously assumed that this was a natural esoteric phenomenon. However, since you have divulged that you created the Garden of Salvation, I can assume that you are responsible for its isolation."

He glanced around at the vast safe haven. "It is difficult to fathom. However, this place is either dimensionally or spatially isolated from the rest of the Beast Domain. That is the only explanation that I can conceive. Both options undoubtedly take an extraordinary amount of energy and power. This is not something one does unless there is a genuine necessity for it."

…

"That's not all," Rui continued. "Adaptively evolving the world, at its very root, around each creature to suit their physiology and anatomy is also undoubtedly extraordinarily energy-consuming. The same can be said regarding sifting through the memories of each and every single creature in this place."

Rui knew both of those as a matter of experience. While the Elder Tree was clearly superior to Rui at both hypnosis and world bending, it undoubtedly took an ocean's worth of energy to continuously scan memories and bend the world using domains.

It was not something that one would subject oneself to for centuries unless it was extremely necessary or desirable.

"Additionally, there's the safe-haven function of the Garden of Salvation," Rui remarked. "Why accept and transport creatures in need of a safe haven to the Garden of Salvation before sending them away after they have recuperated or healed? Why would someone do that?"

I am a tree. I possess no predatory instinct by virtue of not requiring the consumption of other life. I am part of a kingdom of life that sustains all other life.

It was a good attempt, but Rui was not so easily dismissed.

"Lack of a predatory instinct does not beget endless philanthropy," Rui retorted. "No. You're doing this out of necessity. Considering your stationary nature, it's hard to imagine that you're doing this for anything other than survival."

The air prickled.

He knew he had arrived at the cusp of an important deduction.

He smirked. "You need these creatures to survive, don't you?"

…

"However, not in a predatory manner, for reasons you specified," he murmured. "No. You need them to survive for other reasons."

Rui closed his eyes.

What did a tree need to survive?

Well, an esoteric tree was not exactly a regular tree, but even esoteric trees required the Sun and a large variety of elements and compounds, most importantly water, from the land beneath them. They required carbon dioxide.

"Would a powerful esoteric tree require more or less than an ordinary tree?" Rui glanced at the titanic body of the Elder Tree that utterly dwarfed over mountain ranges.

How could such an enormous tree require less?

How could a tree that was not just utterly gigantic but also able to dimensionally or spatially isolate a country's worth of land, adaptively evolve the world of said land to adapt to countless creatures, and tap into their memories, possibly have few conditions for its sustenance?

"The sheer quantity, number, and complexity of your sustenance requirements are probably beyond anything that I can possibly fathom," Rui realized.

The next question presented itself to Rui.

'How would saving all these creatures aid in its sustenance requirements?'

It was actually the easiest question to answer thus far.

"Chemical cycles," Rui deduced. "Nature has countless chemical cycles that rely on a large number of living creatures."

As the name suggested, chemical cycles were endless cycles of chemicals in different states and compounds looping back to each other over and over again.

One such cycle was the nitrogen cycle.

Nitrogen required herbivorous animals to consume vegetation and excrete it into the ground, thereby supplying ammonia to nitrifying bacteria, which nitrified the compound into relevant chemical compounds that vegetation would then absorb for its survival. And it would start the cycle all over again.

In other words, without this nitrogen cycle, vegetation would not survive. This included trees. It probably also included esoteric trees.

The nitrogen cycle alone required many species to be sustained. This indirectly meant that all vegetation needed these species of herbivores and bacteria to survive, else, they too would die.

-